Had he really meant to go to church, or did he think I was testing him, that he had to go to atone for smoking some templar? Self-disgust pricked me. It was clear we couldn’t stay here. “Where do you usually go?” I said, lumbering on. It had been a while since I had solicited company, and like any skill you really need, the social graces get rusty fast.
“There’s a little church a few blocks down—if it hasn’t been torched yet, and the President hasn’t outlawed Presbyterianism.”
“Mind if I come along?” I asked guiltily. It wasn’t as if he could say no. If an officer of the Law comes into your drug-scented apartment and says “Come to Church with me,” you go.
Jim smiled. “Wow—a date! My mom would be so thrilled.” His sincerity cut through the awkwardness and at last we both relaxed. “I haven’t taken a nice girl to church in years—and of course the wicked girls don’t want to go.”
“Which am I supposed to be, nice or wicked?” I laughed.
Jim shrugged. “Anyone who shoots the Deacon can’t be all bad.”
By the time we stepped outside we were well in tune again. I didn’t want the night to possess me as it had when the cop wagon came. I focused on Jim, not resisting the shaping influence of his pattern. It was good to feel myself adapting to something other than the thrill of the hunt, the taste of desperation.
Jim was wearing an antiquated flare-cut trench coat that added a swagger to his gait, like one of those turn of the century hunters in a Tracker flick. His smile was self-parodic, frequent and infectious.
“Leviathan,” he said, pausing to identify the music that fell like a dead body from a fourth story window, all angles and disconnections. “Capable of jamming brain-wave activity at 20 yards. Terrible stuff, but loud enough to annoy the Deacon on many a night, so it has a special place in my heart.” Jim executed a quick, coat-swishing pirouette and gestured around the Court, littered with dull glitters of broken glass. “Say AMEN somebody!”
“Shut the fuck up! Amen!” called a voice from a nearby window. Oblivious, Jim went on. “Strange about the Deacon; he came from in here. He’s barrio from way back, but fell out of touch with it, somehow.”
“He wanted to get out,” I said. “The Reds offered the way. Ideals, abstract things, causes—they take you over, erase what used to be there. God got into White like acid, broke his pattern, smoothed him into one clean surface with one simple idea.” What my father always said, before his stroke: the ideals—virtue, freedom, justice—are patterns bigger than any individual. They can overwhelm you. But they don’t take people into account. Circumstance, character, history—none of it means much to the greater patterns. Of course, my father was a historian; he stressed the long view.
But how else could you explain a man like White? Deacon, pillar of the community, kindly in his way: but a mind eaten away by madness.
Nothing scares me more than insanity; every shaper wonders if it’s contagious. How could I spend so much time with sickos and psychopaths and expect to escape? Trapped like old Daedalus, who built the Labyrinth and couldn’t find his way free. Sooner or later I would turn a corner in the maze, and find a mad minotaur waiting there.
Shit.
Jim was looking at me curiously. I shrugged and forced a laugh. “I don’t know what happened to White. Not really. I barely met the man.”
“Yeah. Well. I still can’t wait to see the headlines: ‘Deacon Decked by Authorized Avenger!’”
“Don’t you take anything seriously?”
“Not if I can help it. Isn’t that what we elected the President to do?”
We chatted. He had always wanted to go to university but never had the money; I had fled my father’s academic world for things that seemed more real, more relevant. We laughed a lot; I forget why. Some of Jim’s laid-back attitudes were irritating; he didn’t want to see the evil in the world, didn’t want to think about it. He refused to take things seriously, and sometimes tricked me into doing the same. But if it was frivolous, it was also fun; it was a good way to come down from the hunt. I had gotten out of the habit of feeling happy.
The barrio did not make happiness easy. It was full of dead-ends and blind alleys, a maze of tenements, cell blocks to hold the poor. In front of us an old man shambled into the darkness, shoulders stooped and feet shuffling with Parkinson’s disease. Another accidental victim of the Presidential Moratorium on neurological research: the good Lord giveth, and the good Lord taketh away. Things chain together; if you start looking, each pattern links to every other, a dance of systems as elaborate as the motion of the planets, and about as concerned with the fates of men.
Jim’s church stood just where the ghetto struggled to raise itself to honest poverty. Light pooled out from under its doors like hot water, cooling as it reached the street. With a half-bow and a comic sweep of his arm Jim held the door open for me; I grinned and went in.
The moment I locked my taser in my pocket and slid off my jacket I felt a great relief. I bathed myself in the comfortable chatter of neighbours as they met in the lobby or jockeyed for their pews, letting their simple goodwill surround and support me. Here and there a young couple dawdled in earnest conversation with their elders. An aging woman with flaming pink hair tut-tutted a disbelieving acquaintance and showed off her new cut. Obviously her sense of fashion had been well-set before the Reds got in.
Slowly the crowd flowed into the church proper, filling up the pews. A hush greeted the arrival of the minister, a pleasant-featured woman in her early forties. She looked out over her flock as if she knew that each had taken an extra cookie, and was secretly rather pleased. Jim leaned over. “That’s Mary Ward; they say she’s a shaper. I don’t know if I believe it, but she’s a good minister.”
I gazed in wonder at the Minister as she opened the big black Bible on the lectern and put on a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses. What shaper would make her nature so public, that a casual parishioner should know? I couldn’t believe that Mrs. Ward had grown up some place where it was safe to be different. You don’t go around telling people that you can read, even experience their emotions—not if you want to be treated like a human being.
Mrs. Ward was genial and slightly plump. When she spoke her voice was surprisingly strong and assured. “Well met, by His grace. As we approach this worship together, friends, I want you to think about the story of Christ’s temptation, from the book of Luke.
‘And he brought him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence:
For it is written, He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee:
And in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.
And Jesus answering said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.
And when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him for a season.’”
Mary Ward looked up, eyes sharp behind gold rims. “I want to talk to you today about faith, and the errors of faith. Think about what it means to have faith in good measure, if you will, and join me in a prayer.”
The strong slow rhythm of the congregation made the rusty gestures easy as I clasped my hands and bowed my head. “Heavenly Father, be with us now as we come to worship Thee, and to find renewed strength in our bond with Thee, a bond forged by the gift of Thine only son. Help us to understand the perils of unbelief, and of faith also, that we may better serve Thee.”
—A preacher? A good calling for a shaper: you could use your abilities for the common good and yet run little risk of discovery. Though Mrs. Ward, if she was a shaper, had hardly been discreet. I felt a sudden stab of envy. How much smarter she had been, to choose such a calling! How wise to use her shaping to bring joy, instead of fear and pain and death.
She stood up at the lectern, and now her greying head was bent in silent prayer. What was that? The perils of faith? A topic that would not have occurred to Deacon White.
?
??And Father, help us to understand the teachings of Thy son, who taught us to pray,”—and here the entire congregation drew a breath, that they might all join in—“saying”:
Our Father, who art in Heaven
Hallowed be thy name
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth, as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our failures
As we forgive those who fail us.
Lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom
And the power and the glory
For ever and ever Amen.
How long had it been, how long since I had been caught in this swell of many voices, this surge of one belief? I rode it like a wave.
“Join me now, will you all, in a prayer of confession.” (A pause, as we folded ourselves into solemnity.) “Father, hear our confession. When troubles come upon us and we are afflicted, we have doubted Your Providence, and doubted the sacrifice You made of Your only Son to save us. We have forgotten Christ’s injunction not to tempt You, and, feeling weak and alone, we have asked in our hearts for strong proofs of Your guardianship.
“And other times, we have used You too much as a refuge, Father. Confronted with a problem we found too confusing, or an issue that disturbed us, we have retreated into a shell of faith. We have chosen to blind ourselves with that faith, and ignored the faculty of reason with which You have blessed us. Or we have demanded Your Law and ignored Your Mercy for those with whom we disagree. This too is to tempt You, for we have tried to avoid our part in living and understanding this world You have so generously given to us. And now let each of us look into our hearts, and confess our sins to the Lord.” Silence fell over the congregation.
Fine words.
Fine words, but I remembered White’s confession too. “Lucky are they not called to serve the Lord, Miss Fletcher.” When serving God meant the brutal murder of a lonely twenty-three year old woman. Didn’t these people know what went on? In the name of the God they were so complacently worshipping?
“And now that we have confessed our sins, friends, let us return again to God, cleansed and eager to understand his teachings,” the minister finished. Around me the people looked up, faces flushed with a fresh gratitude.
All very well, for the gentle Presbyterians. But I remembered the Reds preaching too, the Deacon who had murdered poor Angela Johnson. The wave of good feeling receded, pushed back by her anguish, stilled by the terrible silence in #7, the stink of White’s singed flesh. Even Jim was pulling away from me, listening intently to the service. His God was a God of love.
Well Angela Johnson had died for love.
The Red name was a mockery—redemption was given only lip service in their theology. The Red principle was raw, naked fear. Fear of God. Fear of Hell. Fear that had soaked in crimson stains through Angela’s sheets.
Mary Ward held my eye, standing at the church door after the service. “I hope you’ll come back,” she said quietly. And somehow I knew these words were not a formula she spoke to every member of her congregation: they were meant for me, and me alone.
I could not force a social smile. She could have been standing on a mountain-top, speaking to me in the shadowed valley below, so far away did she seem to me then.
Sometimes God is a God of wrath.
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.
Two
Drab grey light filled my bedroom when I woke the next day. 10:14 a.m. Beyond my window a pall of cloud hid the sky from me, robbing the world of all shape and colour.
My cat, Queen E, was nowhere to be seen. I was alone. I lay in bed, studying the angles of my room. Everything resolves into barren geometry on the morning after a hunt. The crime, the clues, the motives, the make: while the hunt is on all form an elusive pattern, cryptic and fragmentary, a shape I am driven to possess as fiercely as another woman might pursue a lover. But the pattern fully seen, like desire finally satisfied, loses its mystery, and is welded into the inevitable past from which nothing can escape.
A day of thin freedom stretched before me.
God, what a relief it was, reading in Tapper’s book: to think I might not be crazy, to put the name “Shaper” to what I felt. To know that I was not alone, that there were thousands of us, each of us terrified that we were crazy, wicked, unclean, damned.
I hated these days after a hunt had ended, when the emptiness pushed against my windows. I hated the dry void in myself. As a kid I used to wonder if I was crazy, if there was something broken in me that had made my heart dry up, and I would never feel again.
What a relief to read that sometimes being a shaper called forth that desolation. To pay for a time of agonizing intensity, where every frown or smile or blush of shame seemed to cut itself into my body, there might come an hour, a day of numbness far more terrifying. Terrifying because I needed that emotion, no matter how much it hurt, like a junkie jabbing at his arm needs the Chill burning into his blood.
Numbing is a hazard that goes with being a shaper, but lately it had been getting worse for me. Live thirty years imprisoned by other people’s emotions—not just noticing, but really experiencing them—and it grinds you down. You spend so much time blocking people out, you start doing it unconsciously. Then the world comes to you through a glass darkly. Blind. Worse than blind, because this is your goddamn soul filming over, becoming opaque. How strange a paradox: that feeling so much could lead to feeling nothing at all. Psychologists call this numbness the “zero-state”; psychopaths dread it so much they will kill just to feel something, anything.
Driven by a flutter of panic I jumped out of bed. My fingers were trembling as I scrounged some cereal, trying not to think. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t go that way. Please God, not that.
I abandoned breakfast after finding mold furring my oatflakes. Damn those preservatives anyway; carcinogenic and ungodly, I guess, but you sure missed them when they were gone. After careful inspection I settled on some stale crackers.
A shaper lives a lot in a little time. Hate, lust, rage, grief, despair…All coming in, coming through. By the time I was ten I had lived the joy of love and the bitter rancor of a neighbour’s divorce, had felt pain that killed every thought and breath. Drowned in my father’s vast, aching grief when my mother died. I had felt as much as any eighty-year old, and now at thirty I was beginning to wonder if my heart was wearing out. In the last year, a shroud of numbness had begun to wind around me. There were no new emotions any more. Nothing left to experience. Like the city beyond my windows, the world of feelings was vanishing little by little, its outlines becoming blurred, its memory fading, its precious shapes lost to me, hidden behind the clouds.
The phone’s ring cut a diagonal line through my apartment. I reached up to hit the Facesaver and pulled the receiver off the wall beside the fridge. “Yeah?”
“Miss Fletcher?”
“Ms. Who is this?”
There was a moment’s confused pause. “Oh, you don’t have the vid on. Dory Plett from Central here.”
“Yeah?” God, don’t let it be a complaint about the White make, I prayed. According to the late news, the President’s regional press secretary had taken a dive from his downtown office last night. Holy Father, let my little make escape unreported in the ensuing chaos.
“God bless. Look, we need a hunter for an hour or so this morning.”
“What for?” Strict courtesy demanded I turn on the vid, but at this hour that wouldn’t be doing either of us a favour. I perked up. At least I was going to get some work in to ease the comedown, and for that I was grateful.
“We got a big-name scratch over at the NT building. It looks like an accident, but we have to put on a good show.”
“Who was it?”
“Take a guess.”
“Jesus Christ, in the library, with the wrench,” I said wearily.
“Miss Fletcher!” D
ory gasped. Primly she composed herself. “It was Jonathan Mask.”
“Holy shit!”
My guess of Jesus hadn’t been far off. Mask was the most famous actor in America, the shining knight of the Red “Communication Crusade,” although I hadn’t seen him on TV recently condemning drugs or championing the church. Still, he was as big as they came. Which would mean interviews with the media and other circus sideshows. “What’s the rate?”
“Seven hundred to show up and do the honours.”
“My. I feel my sense of civic responsibility stirring to life. Seven hundred, plus a bonus if there’s a make, of course.”
“There won’t be. At least,” Dory added, “that’s the opinion of officers who do this for a job, not just a hobby.”
Had I mentioned that cops don’t care for hunters much?
“Too bad,” I said sweetly. “I was so hoping for something to supplement my welfare cheque. I was thinking of getting a pedicure and a facial.”
“Good thought. Maybe then you’d turn on your vid,” Dory replied cattily. “Anyway, they tell me Mr. Mask blew himself up in his costume. Captain French is down there—he’ll brief you. Soundstage 329.”
“Credit. I’ll be there in an hour.”
As befitted its status, the National Television tower was the tallest building downtown: a hundred story megalith with soundstage #329 on the eighty-eighth floor. I took an enormous freight elevator styled with the latest Red affectation: you had to operate the doors yourself, pulling on a thick strap and watching them clank open like a shiny new portcullis. Rolly French loved this kind of thing; it appealed to his Red sensibilities.
Rolly was a plump, genial man who didn’t like hunters because they were unofficial, and didn’t like women on the payroll, because that was what the Red Presidency had been elected to discourage. Of course he never said this out loud, and we had worked together often enough that at least he called me “Fletcher” now and dropped the Miss.
Rolly was a good cop, thorough but with flashes of insight, and he was willing to work with anything that made him better at his job. For all his Red inclinations, he used Central’s data-net better than most of his peers. In his younger days he had even bucked the massive backlash against bio-tech that followed the fetal transplant riots and the AIDS disclosures. Risking his good name, he had preached to the unbelievers to secure funding for the computer-driven DNA sequencing program that had helped solve more than two thousand cases.